Image credit: Jochen Hartmann

Towards the tail end of an interesting year, a series of articles appeared on Archinect that focused on game design and its role in architectural education, inspiring this interview with Kazys Varnelis of the Network Architecture Lab.

Kazys has been focusing on network culture for almost two decades now, investigating the impact of digital technology on everyday life in a variety of formats and media through exhibitions, publications and teaching. He just recently held a major exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Together, we collaborated to create Symtactics, an asymmetrical board game that simulates how tactical urbanist interventions might play out in a future Hong Kong in the year 2047. The project was part of the Uneven Growth exhibit—a year long research project initiated by the Museum of Modern Art in New York that focused on the role of architectural agency in the face of growing social and economic inequality in 6 cities across the globe.

Ok, let's start with a comment that came up when we were recently talking about the interview and the article that I revised for Archinect which is about games and their possible use in architectural endeavors. You mentioned something along the lines of games as being things you make when a 'situation is impossible'. Can you talk about that a little bit more. What did you mean by that?

With games we are architects not of buildings but of realities. Sometimes we want to escape a reality that is unpleasant, sometimes we want to imagine a worse reality, other times we come up with realities that defy conventional logics. Games allow us to test these realities, examine our relationships with others and reflect upon the reality we live in.

In a situation that appears impossible, games allow us insight into why the situation is impossible and what caused that and they allow us to discover possibilities we previously didn't know existed. 

In the case of the situation we faced in the Uneven Growth show, we came to the conclusion that the brief put us in an impossible condition. How can architecture solve uneven growth through tactical urbanism? Well, we swiftly came to the conclusion that this wasn't possible, so what to do then? 

With games we are architects not of buildings but of realitiesWould you say that this in a way then becomes a fantasy? Can the possibilities that games reveal ever become real?

Well, Nick Bostrum argues that we live in a game, that the universe is a simulation and increasing numbers of astrophysicists agree. I am no expert, but his argument makes sense to me. Simulationist hypothesis aside, it's hard to see where games end and “reality” begins. Politics, economics, academics, architecture, speedboat racing, art collecting, gardening, casual sex, recreational fishing all of these are games of sorts, with their own rules and rewards. Often the rules are incomprehensible to someone outside the game, even to someone inside the game. 

So this idea of rules being incomprehensible, would you say that's a recent condition? Were rules less complex before?

I think it was mixed before and it depends on which “before” you are talking about. On the one hand, society is becoming more and more complex and there are more and more rules. Take the IRS code. It is over 3 million pages long. It’s completely incomprehensible. In, say, the pre-modern era, rules might have been rather easier to follow in some ways. The Church and the court all had relatively straightforward rules. On the other hand, the world was much less known and in particular, we had few models to understand it with. Curiously, certain kinds of rule-based activities occupied one’s leisure time. Chess was one of seven good skills a 12th century knight needed to master.

Jim Dunnigan's Wargames Handbook, Third Edition: How to Play and Design Commercial and Professional Wargames deals with the decline of professional ‘wargaming’ with the rise of PCs and the playing of early PC games in the late 1990s. When we obtained computer based systems, we were able to abstract away much of the game rules and logics that previously had to be memorized and thus were able to create much more complex games and simulations.architects are stuck in a world of heavy things

Do you think there is some sort of endpoint to complexity with regards to network culture? Are we oversaturated with information and on the verge of collapse? I sometimes wonder if we have developed an insatiable appetite for complexity.

There are definitely limits to complexity. The efforts can't be sustained indefinitely. Take the architectural avant-garde. From the 1970s through the 1990s formal and theoretical complexity were constantly rising. Think of Peter Eisenman or the journal Assemblage. Today chunky forms with a couple of angles are in and architects try to speak like refugees from a Silicon Valley TEDx. The energy invested in complexity was too great and the academic game got boring, so architects pulled out. Of course the result is that they are playing another game now, the game of real estate development and star power. More fun, better rewards...for now

That is an interesting point about academia, I assume you're referring to the 'game' of academic formalism. To come back to the beginning and the idea that games allow architects to invent 'realities', do you think that the field is at a point where it needs to invent a new reality for itself as well? I am thinking of a recent headline from Archinect about the need for architects to prove their relevance before Silicon Valley owns the architecture game.

I think that’s true, architects are stuck in a world of heavy things that has largely been passed by with recent developments in technology. For all the attention that the Starchitecture has received, it has nothing to do with everyday experience. The space that is being shaped today is digital, networked, virtual and precious few architects are engaging with that substantively. So architects are ceding space to technology corporations. This doesn’t mean that architects should try to create startups. In 99.5% of cases—100% in the case of the 'startups' coming from universities—this is just naive, self-gratifying behavior without any consequence. Corbusier, Wright, and Sant ‘Eila all wanted to engage with the technology of their time—the automobile—and even if their answers weren’t the right ones, at least they were asking questions. Today’s architects have largely lost the ability to do that. There are a few architects out there, like Mark Shepard, who are thinking about technology in a deep way, but few enough that you might as well be starting from zero. If that means that one can’t just plug into a ready-made discourse, it also means that there is a great deal of possibility for architects who set out in this direction.

Kazys Varnelis is an artist, designer, and scholar. His work focuses on the impact of digital technology on everyday life. He holds a PhD in the History of Architecture and Urban Development from Cornell University and is the founder and Director of the Network Architecture Lab and co-founder of AUDC, entities that are both think tanks and practices, conducting research, producing publications, and exhibitions. With AUDC he has published Blue Monday: Absurd Realities and Natural Histories and exhibited at High Desert Test Sites and other venues. With the Network Architecture Lab, he has edited The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles and Networked Publics and exhibited at the New Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and held a major exhibition at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania. He has taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and Columbia University and was a founding faculty member of the School of Architecture at the University of Limerick, Ireland. He has lectured internationally at schools such as Harvard, Yale, MIT, UCLA, TU-Delft, the IUAV and at venues such as the Frieze Art Fair in London, Transmediale in Berlin, the Digital Life Design Conference in Munich, the Architectural League, the Van Alen Institute, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Open Society Fund, and the Glass House. He has published in journals such as A+U, Praxis, Log, Perspecta, Volume, Cabinet and has served on the boards of numerous scholarly journals such as Thresholds, the Journal of Architectural Education, and Kulturos Barai.